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Interdisciplinary Design and Art Blog

This is an architectural experiment I read years ago already about it and today I saw it again in the AD Magazin and now I really wanted to read and write about it and think the architect Günther Domenig is one of my role models in the way he spend all his money over years in its construction. “The Steinhaus” has become a cultural icon, having hosted concerts, been the subject of television and art projects, and having featured in many books and magazines. Over the many years of its construction, it was both an outlet for his technical and formal experimentation, and a focus for his architectural aspirations.

Here a well written text not by me:

More than twenty years ago, Günther Domenig (born 6 July 1934 in Klagenfurt/ Austria) began to build a house for himself on a narrow sliver of lakeside property in the mountains of Carinthia, Austria. He conceived it as a work of architecture limited only by his imagination and skill, at once a manifesto and an experiment, the outcome of which he could not be sure of at the beginning. The structure grew year by year, piece by piece, following an every-evolving set of sketches and technical drawings, and was financed from his own architectural practice in Graz. When he had a little extra money, he put it into the construction. While the building is called a house, it was never intended as a residence. In fact, Domenig, when he lived at the site over the years, stayed in a small, box-like metal trailer away from the house, not wanting, perhaps, to confuse its purposes. It’s sole purpose was to be architecture. Essential to the house is the vitality, power, risk, existential optimism and idealistic doubt that have characterized its long gestation. In 2008 he finished it.

Domenig’s own statement made during the years of work is candid and unflinching: “I have reached my limits in every respect. Here we shall see what I really can carry out in architecture. I have reached the limits of myself. I am standing in front of the limits of my technical and financial possibilities. There is no way out, no way back. I feel the hopelessness of my own consequence. The better I am, the better each step is, the harder the next one becomes. Maybe I will fail.”( via Lebbeus Woods)